Overview

Adam Harr (Ph.D. University of Virginia) As a linguistic anthropologist, I research how social change is reflected in and precipitated by people’s use of different languages. Since 2002, I have conducted thirty-two months of field research in multilingual communities in the highlands of central Flores, an island in eastern Indonesia. People in these communities speak the Indonesian national language in addition to the Lio language, one of several hundred languages in Indonesia that are classified as “local” or “tribal” languages. My central research questions have been: What social contexts are considered appropriate for the Indonesian language and what contexts are appropriate for the Lio language? Under what circumstances can these contexts shift? What are the social, political, and linguistic implications of Indonesian shifting into a Lio context, and vice-versa? More recently, my research has sought to understand how Arabic, which adult Muslims in Flores are increasingly studying, fits into this ecology of languages.

At St. Lawrence University, I feel privileged to teach a variety of courses in linguistic and cultural anthropology, including Language and Human Experience, Childhood Across Cultures, Writing Culture, and Myth, Magic, and Ritual. In each of my courses, I aim to collaborate with students in hopes that we all come away with a renewed sense of wonder (rigorous, critical wonder) at the strange/beautiful/terrible worlds we humans create and inhabit.

Selected Publications

2016 Recentering the Margins? The Politics of Local Language in a Decentralizing Indonesia. In Margins, Hubs, and Peripheries in a Decentralizing Indonesia, Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies (Special Issue 162).

2015 Moving Words: Christian Language in the Modern World. In Reviews in Anthropology 44: 1-17.